Excellent idea but I don't see it going anywhere, honestly. More money to be had in forcing people to upgrade, or making it trendy to upgrade (like apple does with the iPhone). It also doesn't seem like anything more than a decent idea at this point, I'll start believing in it more when they have some sort of real hardware to show to the world.
I don't buy a new phone when something breaks, though. Like with my iPhone, I just replaced the screen for about $20 when it cracked. Then again I am a computer nerd studying to be a computer engineer and I love doing stuff like that. But still, I would be nice to be able to upgrade components in the phone like a PC. We can already upgrade the storage with SD-Cards, though.
Affen said:
Ever had your phone drop and the battery flying away? Dropping that phone and having all the pieces scatter away would be horrifying.
Cool idea. That simple way of changing parts could be used in other electronic devices too.
It wouldn't be too hard to implement a mechanism that snaps everything into place. Instead of having the back exposed there could be a very thin cover that clamps everything down with two screws, sort of like how the iPhone is constructed, but more elegant.
madster111 said:
There's a very good reason phones are built like they are now.
This concept will make everything more expensive, MUCH larger (all that space needed for connectors and separate heatsinks) and it's likely to actually increase pollution.
Although it sounds awesome, in reality it'll just make everything slightly worse so that you can slap a new GPU in your phone every year or so.
Not necessarily. From the diagram it looks like the phone will essentially be a giant breadboard. May be troublesome getting the parts to communicate with each other using the many different configurations, but they could set up some sort of software solution where the component ignores any signal sent on a certain "channel." across the same line. That will probably make the phone operate slower, though, since every component will have to filter out unwanted signals.